Well, first, I’m engaged to be married, and we have a daughter, which keeps me really busy lately.
It makes finding a balance interesting. I’m an engineer, that’s what fuels my hope, and I enjoy the process of engineering. I like solving problems and building things. But I have to be careful about that. I had my own startup in 2013; when you have your own startup you end up doing everything that needs to be done, no matter how much time it takes. And that skewed my mindset, negatively, towards being too work-oriented. I’m very careful about limiting how that affects family time.
I’ve been trying to do my work earlier, so that I can call it a day at 5:00 pm and spend time with family. Being able to balance work and personal life — something I was never really good at — helps both of them. With that said, working at Clipboard is so interesting that sometimes I have a hard time turning it off. Luckily, my fiancée is super supportive.
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My mom was a nurse, and I grew up watching a lot of the difficulties she worked through because of that. We made it, but our finances weren’t always stable. She worked really hard to make sure we had everything we needed.
I also learned through watching her that companies and organizations aren’t always loyal to their workers. I remember one time recently I was reading a story about a fast-food restaurant that was laying off hundreds of people, but was also building a $13,000,000 vault to hold its secret recipe as a kind of a PR thing. Some companies are like that, they don’t value people and the people who work for them can’t count on them.
I think Clipboard Health gives nurses some of their power back by giving them alternatives. If a nurse is being asked to do something unreasonable and she doesn’t have any choice between that and losing all her income, that’s a situation where the nurse has to do whatever they are asking. With CBH, they can say “no” and know that if things get messy they still have a way to work and support themselves while they look for something better. That’s a lot of power to hand back to someone.
There’s other reasons, too. Clipboard Health is a very young company, and there’s a lot of opportunities to be high-impact. But it’s also very financially stable and very low risk, which is rare.
My last startup did well, but nothing shocking. The fact that we eventually sold and walked away with any money at all probably put us in the 99th percentile of startups all by itself. That’s the kind of risk/reward ratio you are usually walking into if you want to have that kind of impact and opportunity of advancement.
I don’t think word has quite gotten out yet in the engineering community about how fast Clipboard is growing or how much opportunity there is here, especially in terms of how stable and successful we already are.
If anything, my specialty is front end. But in a lot of ways my specialty is a lack of specialty. In college, I was a double major in accounting and finance. I learned software to the extent that I needed to make products after that. So I broadly fall into the “lots of breadth, not as much depth” category, which I think is typical of a lot of people who did a lot of their learning under real-world pressure. But that means there are a lot of places where I can identify a need, learn enough to solve it and make sure things are working well where we don’t necessarily have a specific specialist to handle the issue.